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It's SLI time!

As most of you know both ATI and NVIDIA have solutions on the market called Crossfire and SLI respectively. Basically this will allow you to play your games with the help of multiple graphics processors (GPUs). Within the confines of compatible mainboards you can increase the overall rendering performance of your games and thus increase your graphical gaming experience in several ways. Simply stated, you can run two or more "graphics cards" on selected mainboards, or one (or more) graphics card(s) with multiple graphics cores on it.

By utilizing more of them whether that is two or more GPU's on a videocard or two graphics cards in one system is what we call Multi-GPU processing of games.

How to setup SLI

Let's talk a little about installation.

Well, I really have to give props to NVIDIA here as hardware and software installation simply is a breeze. Obviously assemble your PC, I won't go into details here as hey, you are a guru, you do it on a monthly basis right? :) But once you have your system ready you can have SLI powered up and ready to roll within a minute as it really is that easy to do.

Basically there are six steps you need to take. Here's what you need to do:

• Ready your PC, make sure all the latest mainboard, peripherals and OS drivers are up-to-date
• Insert cards into PCI-Express slots
• Push SLI bridge on the GeForce 8800 cards
• Connect 12v 6-pin PSU connector to each card (if possible make sure each 12v connector is on a different 12v rail)
• Boot PC, install latest ForceWare driver
• Reboot system and there we go

In our case the system immediately activated SLI and we were ready to go. Now I'll quickly sift through the benchmark results without too much text. You'll understand why.

Prey 4xAA & 16xAF

So pretty much I picked a couple of SLI solutions we tested in the past to compare with. First of all what you need to focus on is the performance between a single 8800 GTS 320 MB and then in SLI. SLI works really well as you'll notice from the charts.

To make it a little more interesting I included 2x GeForce 7900 GT 512MB in SLI, obviously a 7950 GX2 which is a SLI card and the 8800 GTX 768 MB in SLI. Very impressive. Have a look at Prey.

Far Cry HDR & 16xAF

There's some CPU limitation there but have a look at 1600x1200 where memory size does not matter, and then look at the resolutions above 1600x1200 as performance starts falling down like a brick.